The Crisis of European Science
and Transcendental Phenomenology is Husserl's last work. Written in the
thirties, the first part was published in 1936, the second part only after Husserl's
death.

I would like to indicate first
where I see the general historical locus of this work. It seems to me that we
have to place it into the context of the radical reexamination of the Western
concept of Reason, of Western rationality that begins in the last decades of
the nineteenth century and to which so essentially different thinkers as Bergson,
Dilthey, Max Weber, Spengler, Piaget, and Bachelard belong. All of them have
in common this questioning of the very idea which has guided Western thought
since its Greek origins, i.e., the rationality typical of the occident. It seems
to me that Husserl is the last in this group, and in a certain sense, (which
may strike you as strange) the most radical of these re‑examiners. In
Husserl, it is modern science itself, this most sacrosanct child of Western
rationality, that is questioned. In this reexamination, modern science appears
as the end of a fateful development which begins with Greek thought, that is,
with the origins of Western thought itself—as the "end" of
this development in the twofold sense of termination and of fulfilling the telos, the purpose, the objective of this thought.

According to Husserl, science,—modern
science, Galilean as well as post-Galilean,originates in the Greek idea
of knowledge and truth and comes to rest in a scientific rationality in which
truth and validity contain in themselves illusion and repression. Before I try
to present Husserl's radical thesis, I have to stress that it is not the result
of a sociological analysis or of a sociology of knowledge. It is precisely the
fascinating aspect of Husserl's work that it is a [end p. 279]philosophical
analysis within the academic framework of intellectual history, even within
the academic division of labor. Husserl emphasizes philosophy as Beruf,
as calling, and that philosophy is done in the Berufszeit, that is to
say, in the time reserved, in the academic division, for such investigations.
Husserl adds (and this is important: I come back to it at the end) that the
calling of the philosopher is a unique calling because (and I quote him)

this calling is linked with the "possibility of a radical transformation
of humanity," and not only a radical transformation of humanity but also
a "liberation," and this possibility makes the calling of the philosopher
unique within the division of labor. [1]

In the course of such a philosophical
undertaking (philosophical also in the sense of a discipline!), in the course
of its own inner development Husserl's analysis transcends itself, or rather
it descends from the pure theoretical to the impure pre‑theoretical, practical
dimension. Better—the pure theoretical analysis discovers its own internal
impurity, but only to return from this impure sphere to the still pure theoretical
dimension of transcendental phenomenology as constituent of the practical, pre-theoretical
dimension, the Lebenswelt. (I use the German term Lebenswelt.
The literal translation "life‑world" is too, large and too vague
in this context; what Husserl means is our own empirical day‑to‑day
world as, it is given in immediate experience, practical and other—the
world of life and death, in our empirical reality. So I will use either 'Lebenswelt' or 'empirical reality').

I will now devote some time
to presenting Husserl's own thesis (the work is not fully translated; we only
have Gurwitsch's excellent abstract of it), but I shall focus it in such a way
that the critical problems stand out. Husserl begins with a very brief description
of what he considers the Greek concept of Reason, namely the idea of human being
as self‑determination and determination of its world by virtue of man's
intellectual faculties, the concept of Reason, according to which man's intellectual
faculties are at the same time capable of determining his own life and of determining,
defining, and changing the universe. This conception presupposes [280] that
the universe itself which is thus rationally comprehended is in its very structure
a rational system and therefore accessible to knowledge and change on the grounds
of man's own rational knowledge. In other words, Reason for the Greeks, is objective
and subjective at one and the same time, and on this basis, Reason is the subjective
as well as objective instrument for changing the world in accord with man's
rational faculties and ends. But in this process, Reason itself as theoria,
is and remains the basis of the transformation of the world. Philosophy is thus
established as science, and as first, most excellent and general science,
which must give direction and the end to, all other sciences.

What are the implications of
this original concept of Reason? First, it implies a supra‑factual, supra‑temporal
validity of Reason, so that the really real as discovered and defined by Reason
is rational as against the immediately given fact. Reason establishes
an authority and reality which is in this way antagonistic to the immediately
given facts. Secondly, true being is ideational being (a conclusion from the
first implication), not being as we experience it immediately in the flux of
our empirical, practical world. Thus "Platonism" is the basis of all
scientific knowledge. Thirdly, objectivity is necessarily correlated with subjectivity,
again the subjective as well as objective structure of Reason. Husserl here
gives a formulation which, in an entirely different context, recaptures the
very question and thesis with which Western philosophy began, namely, the final
identity of Being and Reason. He says:

Can Being and Reason be separated if cognitive Reason determines (the essence
of being?) [2]

So we find at the very beginning
and at the late stage of western philosophy this almost literal identity in
the formulation of the basic problem, the mysterious union and even identity
of Reason and Being, Knowing and Being. Now this concept of Reason, which is
theoretical and practical Reason in one, is understood by Husserl as a project.
I use the term here as it was elaborated in the philosophy of Sartre: "project"
in the sense that this idea of rationality and its application is a specific
way of experiencing, in- [281] terpreting, organizing and changing the
world, a specific historical project among other possible ones, not the only,
necessary project. This project, according to Husserl, came to fulfillment with
the foundation of modern science, namely, in Galilei's mathematization of nature.
Galilei's mathematization of nature established that purely rational, ideational
system which was the dream of all Platonism; Galilei established the ideational
world mathematically as the true reality. Substituting this scientific universe
for the only given reality, namely, our empirical Lebsenswelt. But the
very fulfillment of this project was also its collapse, according to Husserl.
For this scientific rationality, this idea of Reason and its application proved
successful only in the positive sciences and in the technological conquest of
Nature, while the original foundation of this entire science, that which originally
was supposed to constitute the very structure, content and end of science, namely,
philosophy, remained an impotent, abstract, meaningless metaphysical sphere
of knowledge and continued in this impotent form a hopeless academic existence
which, in addition, was more and more dissolved into psychology. Thus separated
from the basic philosophy which, according to the original ideas of Reason,
was supposed to give the ends, the objectives, the meaning of science, separated
from this basic philosophy which was supposed to provide the truly universal
concepts, Reason was at the same time divorcedand this is decisive for
Husserlfrom that rational humanitas envisaged in the original philosophical
project. Scientific, technological rationality became reason kath' exochen.
Divorced from the validating "ends" set by philosophy, the rationale
set by science and the rationale of its development and progress became that
of the Lebenswelt itself, in which and for which this science developed.
[3] Instead of rationally transcending the Lebenswelt, science comprehended,
expressed, and extended the specific rationale of the Lebenswelt, namely,
the ever more effective mastery of the environment (Herrschaft über
die praktische Umwelt), including the ever more effective mastery of man.
[4] But that was, not the inherent telos of science, which was first
and foremost, and not only in a chronological sense, the telos defined
by the empirical reality in which science developed. Thus theoretical Reason,
pure Reason, without losing its scientific character as theory, becomes [282]
practical Reason. Theory, by virtue of its internal dynamic rather than
on external grounds, becomes a specific, historical practice. But (and this
is decisive for Husserl and the justification of his own subsequent phenomenological
reduction) this entire development, this entire transformation of Reason, this
essential, structural, internal commitment of pure Reason, pure theory and pure
science to the empirical reality in which they originated, this entire transformation
remains hidden to science itself, hidden and unquestioned. The new science
does not elucidate the conditions and the limits of its evidence, validity,
and method; it does not elucidate its inherent historical denominator. It remains
unaware of its own foundation, and it is therefore unable to recognize its servitude;
unable to free itself from the ends set and given to science by the pre‑given
empirical reality.—I should like to stress again, because these formulations
can be easily misunderstood, that it is not a sociological relation which is
here established between an empirical reality and the pure science which develops
in this empirical reality. Husserl's concept goes much farther. He maintains
that the empirical reality is the framework, and dimension in which the pure
scientific concepts develop. In other words, the empirical reality constitutes,
in a specific sense, the very concepts which science believes are pure theoretical
concepts.

Before I go on with Husserl's
interpretation of this development, I would like to reformulate and to extend
his thesis in a way which may bring out its provocative implications. What happens
in the developing relation between science and the empirical reality is the
abrogation of the transcendence of Reason. Reason loses its philosophical power
and its scientific right to define and project ideas and modes of Being beyond
and against those established by the prevailing reality. I say: "beyond"
the empirical reality, not in any metaphysical but in a historical sense, namely,
in the sense of projecting essentially different, historical alternatives.

Now back to Husserl's interpretation.

The new science (by which he
understands mainly Galilean science) establishes a rational "infinite"
universe of Being (I follow his words here literally), systematically organized
and defined by science itself. Within this universe, every object becomes accessible
to knowledge, not incidentally, in its contingent, particular occur- [283]
rence, but necessarily and in its very essence. [5] Thus, it becomes object
of scientific knowledge, not as this individual object but as exemplification
of general objectivity (the falling feather as res extensa in motion).
[6] That is to say, the concrete and particular object, the Aristotelian totality
is no longer the Wesen, the essence; Platonism supersedes Aristotelianism,
not only in physics, but in the very concept of scientific rationality. And
concomitant with this de-individualization, which is the pre‑requisite
for the quantification of the scientific universe, is the familiar reduction
of secondary to primary qualities; devaluation of the inexorably individual
sense experience as nonrational. [7]

As a result of this twofold
process, reality is now idealized into a "mathematical manifold":
everything which is mathematically demonstrated with the evidence of universal
validity as a pure form (reine Gestalt) now belongs to the true
reality of nature. [8] But (and here is the great gap which separates the new
science from its classical original) in contrast to the ideational forms of
Plato, the ideational forms of mathematical physics are freed from any substantive
connection with other than mathematical ends. The ideational realm of Galilean
science no longer includes the moral, esthetic, political Forms, the Ideas
of Plato. And separated from this realm, science develops now as an "absolute"
in the literal sense no matter how relative within its own realm it may be,
absolved from its own, pre-scientific and nonscientific conditions and foundations.
According to Husserl, the absolute evidence of mathematics (which as we shall
see we question), was for Galilei so self‑evident that he never asked
for the actual foundation of its validity, for the validating ground of this
evidence, and of its extension to the whole of nature. Thus, the validation
of the new science remained in the dark; its own basis never became the theme
of scientific inquiry; science contained an unmastered, unscientific foundation.
This is of the utmost importance for the validity of science itself,
because the relation between science and the pre-scientific empirical reality
is for Husserl not an external one but one which affects the very structure
and meaning of the scientific concepts themselves.

Now according to Husserl, where
is this pre‑scientific validating ground of mathematical science? It is
originally in geometry as the [284] art of measuring (Messkunst)
with its specific means and possibilities. [9] This art of measuring in the
empirical reality promised and indeed achieved the progressive calculability
of nature, subjecting nature to the ever more exact "foresight" in
mastering and using nature. (Foresight—Voraussicht, perhaps better translated
as projection and valid, rational anticipation). Foresight and anticipation,
rational anticipation can then guide the practical orientation in and the transformation
of the empirical Lebenswelt, without however (and this is decisive) setting
or defining or changing the goals and ends of this transformation. Geometry
can and does furnish (and the same holds true for the extension of geometry,
mathematics) the methods and ever more exact, ever more calculable approaches
for the transformation and extension of the established Lebenswelt, but
remains forever incapable of defining, anticipating, or changing, by its own
concepts, the ends and objectives of this transformation. In its method and
concepts, the new science is essentially non‑transcendent. This is what
I consider as Husserl's key sentence: Science "leaves the Lebenswelt
in its essential structure in its own concrete causality unchanged."
[10]

As to the interpretation of
this paradoxical and provocative thesis (so obviously paradoxical since we are
used to seeing in science one of the most dynamic forces in the world): In my
view, what is at stake is not the more or less external relation between science
and society, but the internal conceptual structure of science itself, its pure
theory and method which Husserl now reveals in their essential historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), in their commitment to the specific historical project in which they originated."
Pure science retains, aufgehoben (to use Hegel's term now) the practice
out of which it arose, and it contains the ends and values established by this
practice. The empirical reality thus performs the sinngebende Leistung
(constituent act): It is constitutive of scientific truth and validity.
Science is Aufhebung der Lebenswelt

(1) inasmuch as science cancels
the data and truth of immediate experience,
(2) inasmuch as science preserves the data and truth of experience, but
(3) preserves them in a higher form, namely in the ideational, idealized form
of universal validity.

[285] And this threefold
process takes place in the scientific abstraction. The quantified ideational
forms are abstracted from the concrete qualities of the empirical reality, but
the latter remains operative in the very concepts and in the direction in which
the scientific abstraction moves.

In this way, the pre‑scientific,
pregiven empirical reality enters the scientific enterprise itself and makes
it a specific project within the preestablished general project of the empirical
reality. However, the abstract ideational, mathematical form into which science
transforms the empirical conceals this historical relation:

The Ideenkleid (the ideational veil) of mathematics and mathematical
physics represents and [at the same time] disguises the empirical reality
and leads us to take for True Being that which is only a method. [12]

This is perhaps the most effective
and lasting mystification in the history of Western thought! What is actually
only one method appears as the true reality, but a reality with a telos of
its own. The mathematical ideation, with all its exactness, calculability, foresight,
leaves a void (Leerstelle) because the objectives and ends of
this calculability and anticipation are not scientifically determined. This
void can thus be filled by whatever specific end the empirical reality provides,
the only condition being that it is within the range of scientific method. This
is the famous neutrality of pure science which here reveals itself as an illusion,
because the neutrality disguises, in the mathematical‑ideational form,
the essential relation to the pregiven empirical reality.

In Husserl's terms: The objective
a priori of science itself stands under a hidden empirical a priori, the so‑called
lebensweltliche a priori. [13] Moreover, as long as this empirical a
priori remains hidden and unexamined, scientific rationality itself contains
its inner and own irrational core which it cannot master. According to Husserl,
modern science thus operates like a machine which everyone can learn to handle
without necessarily understanding the inner necessity and possibility of its
operation. [14] In other words, pure science has an inherently instrumental
character prior to all specific application; the Logos of pure science is technology
and [286] is thus essentially dependent on external ends. This introduces
the irrational into science, and science cannot overcome its irrationality as
long as it remains hidden from science. In Husserl's words: Reason is Reason
only as manifest Reason (offenbare Vernunft), and Reason "knows
itself as Reason only if it has become manifest." [15] In as much as Reason
remains non‑manifest in science, scientific rationality is not yet the
full rationality of science. How can Reason become conscious of itself?

Husserl proposes to break the
mystification inherent in modern science by a phenomenological analysis which
is in a literal sense a therapeutic method. Therapeutic in the sense
that it is to get behind the mystifying concepts and methods of science and
to uncover the constitutive lebensweltliche a priori under which all
scientific a priori stands. This is to Husserl first a methodological problem.
The pregiven empirical reality as a whole must become the object of the philosophical
analysis, otherwise the a priori prior to the scientific a priori could never
come to light. But obviously philosophy itself is part of this empirical reality
and philosophy itself stands under the a priori of the empirical reality. The
circle is to be broken by a dual phenomenological reduction (suspension, epoche):
first the suspension of the objective a priori; the suspension of scientific
truth and validity; secondly the suspension of the lebensweltliche a
priori, of the doxa and its validity.

Now what do we retain, what
remains as the residuum of this twofold suspension? In the first epoche,
"we put in brackets" (that is to say, we do not deny but simply suspend
judgment on) scientific truth and scientific validity. What remains as the residuum
is (a) the entire general structure of the empirical reality, [16] the infinite
manifold of things in time and space, the orta, and (b) the world itself in
which all these things necessarily appear—the world as the universal, unsurpassable
horizon of all particular objects. But this first epoche is not sufficient:
it cannot do what it is supposed to do, namely, break through the mystification
and uncover the ultimate foundation of scientific truth. It cannot do this because
with this first "bracketing" we are still on the basis (auf dem
Boden) of the empirical reality, within the "natural position"
of our day‑to‑day experience. A second epoche is necessary
which "at one stroke" leads to a total alteration of the "natural
position" of [287] experience, to the suspension of the natural
validation of everything that we naturally accept as valid in our immediate
experience. [17] Once we have suspended these judgments too, we reflect no longer
on the pregiven world and the particular objects appearing in it, but on how
these objects appear, on the modes in which this entire world is
given to us. The residuum of this epoche is thus the world as correlate
of a totality of modes of consciousness, as a "synthetic totality."
What we have now as residuum is the transcendental subjectivity, [18]
and to this transcendental subjectivity the world is now given as phenomenon
of and for an absolute subjectivity. [19] This transcendental subjectivity is
no longer any particular or individual or group subjectivity. It is "absolute"
because whatever object or object‑relation may appear, now appears as
necessarily constituted in specific acts of synthesis which. inseparably link
objectivity and subjectivity. In other words, we have now what we might call
the absolute original experience: the experience which is at the origin of and
is constitutive of any possible objectivity that can ever become the object
of scientific and of any other thought. The phenomenological reduction has now
opened the dimension in which the original and most general structure of all
objectivity is constituted.

I shall add only a few critical
remarks. The breakthrough to the transcendental subjectivity is supposed to
be the road to uncover the foundation on which all scientific validity rests.
I ask the question: can the reductive phenomenological analysis ever attain
its goal, namely, to go behind scientific, and pre‑scientific, validity
and mystification? I shall offer three suggestions.

First: The phenomenological
analysis is confronted with the fact of reification (Husserl does not use this
term) . Reification is a form which is usually not examined. Scientific as well
as pre‑scientific experience are false, incomplete inasmuch as they experience
as objective (material or ideational) what in reality is subject-object,
objectivation of subjectivity. In founding the analysis on the constitutive
subject‑object correlation, Husserl's dual epoche does go behind
the reification—but so does all transcendental idealism. Thus far we are, in
my view, in no way beyond Kant. I know Husserl's own interpretation of the difference
between phenomenology and Kant; I think that in the context of my criticism
this [288] difference is not very relevant. My point is that the phenomenological
breakthrough stops short of the actual constituent subjectivity. Husserl
transcends the objective a priori of science in the first epoche and
the empirical a priori in the second epoche. He thus creates a conceptual
metalanguage for the critical analysis of the empirical reality. But my question
is: does this conceptual metalanguage really come to grips with the constituent
subjectivity? I think not.

Second: The phenomenological
reduction arrives at a subjectivity which constitutes only the most general
forms of objectivity, for example, the general form of appearing as object,
changing as object, being related to other objects. But does this subjectivity
give us "manifest Reason" behind the disguising Reason, the validation
of scientific truth? Can this transcendental subjectivity ever explain—and
solve—the crisis of European science? Husserl's transcendental subjectivity
is again a pure cognitive subjectivity. One does not have to be a Marxist in
order to insist that the empirical reality is constituted by the subject of
thought and of action, theory and practice. Husserl recognizes
the historical subject in its sinngebende Leistung; but then,
by suspending, bracketing it, the phenomenological analysis creates its own
a priori, its own ideation, and its own ideological veil. Pure philosophy now
replaces pure science, as the ultimate cognitive lawgiver, establishing objectivity.
This is the hubris inherent in all critical transcendentalism which in
turn must be cancelled. Husserl himself seems to have been aware of this hubris.
He speaks of the philosopher as "urquellend fungierende Subjektivität": the philosopher functions as the primordial source of what can rationally
be claimed as objective reality.

I come to the conclusion and
leave it as a question. Husserl recognizes the fetishism of scientific universality
and rationality by uncovering the specific historical‑practical foundations
of pure science. He sees that pure science is in its very structure technological—at
least potentially applied science. The scientific method itself remains dependent
on a specific Lebenswelt. This is the hidden irrational element in scientific
rationality. Husserl finds the reason for this dependence in the loss of the
philosophical dimension, which was originally the basic dimension of science.
Classical [289] philosophy defined the method and function of science
in terms of an idea of Reason which claimed higher truth and validity than those
embodied in, and established by, the given empirical reality. This validating
idea of Reason was that of the telos of man as man, the realization of
humanitas. According to Husserl, the humanistic structure of Reason collapses
with the release of science from this philosophical foundation. This would imply
that humanism becomes an ideology at the very time when modern humanism is born.
In other words, the birth hour of humanism itself would be the degradation of
humanism to a mere ideology. Apparently there must be something wrong with this
formulation. The fact remains that humanism is still today an ideology, a higher
value which little affects the inhuman character of reality. The question with
which I would like to conclude is this: Is philosophy entirely innocent of this
development, or does it perhaps share the hubris of science? Does it
share the reluctance to examine its own real foundation and function and is
it therefore equally guilty of failing in the task of Theoria, of Reason—to
promote the realization of humanitas?